This is an enjoyable Western that moves along well enough, with three "suspenseful" sequences: Sam's unarmed ride through the desert, the townsmen's mission for water, and the church siege.
Stephen McNally does fine in the lead, but another underrated actor, James Griffith, seemed miscast as the army officer - he was more suited to enigmatic or semi-sinister roles. Armando Silvestre makes an impressive and dignified Indian scout.
The version I saw on British TV seemed to have been edited, because the "Variety" review mentions Sam distracting the frightened children with sleight-of-hand, and the kids singing "Oranges and Lemons"; had these scenes been included in the version I saw, I suspect I might have winced at their sentimentality but they would have added depth to Sam's character.
The saloon girls evicted from Spanish Boot were the usual highly- glamourised girls that Hollywood used to depict in preference to the drabs they must have been to have worked in what looked quite a dump of a town.
And there was a new take on my usual query about what happens to the bodies of felled Indians that mysteriously disappear between charges that follow closely on one another in attacks on forts and wagon trains. The defenders must have killed a dozen Indians jumping through the church windows (conveniently announcing their presence by screaming), and if the siege had gone on much longer their out-of-sight corpses would have begun to smell.
Another commentator has referred to the concluding "cutesy shot of a little donkey trotting up to its mother. It's so weirdly sudden after all the long drawn out, moody, tense, heightened tension that preceded it that it completely whips the metaphorical carpet out from underneath you." In fact I saw this as a symbol of regeneration, that the town would be rebuilt and grow up, as Mayor Maddden indicated it would when the Apaches were burning the buildings.
Stephen McNally does fine in the lead, but another underrated actor, James Griffith, seemed miscast as the army officer - he was more suited to enigmatic or semi-sinister roles. Armando Silvestre makes an impressive and dignified Indian scout.
The version I saw on British TV seemed to have been edited, because the "Variety" review mentions Sam distracting the frightened children with sleight-of-hand, and the kids singing "Oranges and Lemons"; had these scenes been included in the version I saw, I suspect I might have winced at their sentimentality but they would have added depth to Sam's character.
The saloon girls evicted from Spanish Boot were the usual highly- glamourised girls that Hollywood used to depict in preference to the drabs they must have been to have worked in what looked quite a dump of a town.
And there was a new take on my usual query about what happens to the bodies of felled Indians that mysteriously disappear between charges that follow closely on one another in attacks on forts and wagon trains. The defenders must have killed a dozen Indians jumping through the church windows (conveniently announcing their presence by screaming), and if the siege had gone on much longer their out-of-sight corpses would have begun to smell.
Another commentator has referred to the concluding "cutesy shot of a little donkey trotting up to its mother. It's so weirdly sudden after all the long drawn out, moody, tense, heightened tension that preceded it that it completely whips the metaphorical carpet out from underneath you." In fact I saw this as a symbol of regeneration, that the town would be rebuilt and grow up, as Mayor Maddden indicated it would when the Apaches were burning the buildings.